Hurricane Modification?

Can human intervention diminish the force of a hurricane? From
the mid-1960s through the early 1980s NOAA actively pursued Project
STORMFURY, a program of experimental hurricane modification.
The general strategy was to reduce the intensity of the storm
by cloud seeding.
The seeding, it was argued, would stimulate the formation of a
new eyewall that would surround the existing eyewall. The new
eyewall would contract, strangling the old eyewall and reducing
the intensity of the hurricane. However, research carried out
at AOML showed clearly that these "concentric eyewalls" happened
often in unmodified hurricanes, thus casting doubt on the seemingly
positive results of seeding in earlier experimentation. Hurricane
Luis
provides an example of this behavior. Moreover, observations showed
that hurricanes contain little of the supercooled water necessary
for cloud seeding to work.

The American Meteorological Society policy statement on planned and inadvertent weather
modification, dated October 2, 1998, indicates, "There is no sound physical hypothesis
for the modification of hurricanes, tornadoes, or damaging winds in general, and no
related scientific experimentation has been conducted in the past 20 years."
In the absence of a sound hypothesis, no Federal agencies are presently doing,
or planning, research on hurricane modification.

Some techniques besides seeding clouds that have been considered over the
years include: cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs,
retardation of surface evaporation with monomolecular films, changing
the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption
of sunlight with carbon black, blowing the hurricane apart with
hydrogen bombs, injecting air into the center with a huge maneuverable
tube to raise the central pressure, and blowing the storm away
from land with windmills. As carefully reasoned as some of these
suggestions are, they all fall short of the mark because they
fail to appreciate the size and power of tropical cyclones. For
example, when hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the
eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy
released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and
electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power
plant over which the eye passed. Better building codes, wiser
land use, and more accurate forecasts seem prosaic compared with
environmental mega engineering but they are a great deal cheaper
and have overwhelmingly favorable cost-benefit ratios.